The Official PhotoShelter Lightroom Plug-in – Now Available!

It’s here! We’re excited to announce PhotoShelter’s brand new official Lightroom plug-in, currently in its first release. Designed for you to upload images straight from Lightroom after edits, this plug-in allows you to access all your PhotoShelter galleries (both listed and unlisted) and get images exactly where they need to be – all metadata and edits intact.

Watch the video below as PhotoShelter staff member and pro photographer in his own right, Chris Owyoung, walks you through how the new plug-in works, and check out our Support page for step by step guidance and more information. If you’d like to download it for yourself, click here.

We’d like to give a big thank you and shout out to Paul Kamphuis of Pact Photography for creating and maintaining the original, third party Lightroom plug-in. Thanks Paul for all your efforts!

Nice video Chris! I must admit that the Aperture guys have been lucky to have a basic plug-in for the last few years 🙂 Any idea when the Aperture plug-in might get an update from PhotoShelter to cover things like concurrent uploading?

Being able to replace existing images for either updated IPTC or actual image edits would be a good thing to have. I’ve already emailed the product team with this suggestion. Given that this is only the first “1.0 version” of this plug-in it’s quite likely that additional functionality will be added in a future update.

wow, a new thingie. What about something called “publish services” in LR? Not a better thing to publish instead of an export? Personally I think it is somewhat more user friendly? If not enlighten me. 🙂

Whether or not you prefer a publish plug-in versus an export plug-in depends on your own workflow. Personally, while I would probably use a publish plug-in, it’s more important to my workflow to be able to create new Collections and Galleries in the Listed and Unlisted areas of my account and have the option of inheriting the visibility and access permissions I’ve already set up. For example, if I’ve set up a Collection that one of my clients already has access to, I can deliver any new jobs I shoot for them by creating new Galleries/Collections inside the existing one and they’ll automatically have access without me ever leaving Lightroom.

What, if anything, are the advantages of this plug-in as opposed to the PACT plug-in, which offers the capability of automagically replacing published images on PS if changes have been made to those images?

The PACT plug-in (for all of it’s many many merits) does not currently support setting the location (listed vs. unlisted) or the visibility (everyone, those with permission, no one but me) on new Galleries/Collections. As a photographer who uses PhotoShelter to deliver new jobs to repeat clients, this functionality is extremely important. As I said in the video, this is going to save me tons of time when I deliver large jobs. On the flip side, I personally never need to replace images after I upload them so the ability to re-publish is less important to me. So in a nutshell, my answer is that it depends on your workflow.

I hope the official plugin will soon offer publishing service, with a link between one image and the different galeries where it could be found, like Paul Kamphuis plugin. Export is not so satisfying to keep a trace of pictures when they are many !

Why Photoshelter invested in an export plugin, and not their own LR publish service, is beyond me. For my uses, I see this as a much worse option than the existing publish service by Paul. I like Paul’s publish service but it doesn’t compare to Smugmug’s own plugin. I’ve been using Smugmug and Photoshelter concurrently for different reasons and the lack of a more advanced publish service on Photoshelter is absolutely the number one reason why I will drop Photoshelter and keep Smugmug. Totally blown away that Photoshelter invested in a useless export plugin and not a publish service. What a disappointment.

Location and visibility are easily changed with two clicks in Photoshelter, and, as you said to Brian, above, “Being able to replace existing images for either updated IPTC or actual image edits would be a good thing to have.” The Pact plug-in does this automatically. But to me you said, “I personally never need to replace images after I upload them so the ability to re-publish is less important to me. ” So I’m confused, and I’m really TRYING to see why the new plug-in is better than the PACT one.

I was simply agreeing with Brian and generally acknowledging that an image-replace feature would be a nice thing to have even if it’s not at all important to my personal workflow. For my needs, this new export plug-in is better. For your needs, the PACT publish plug-in sounds better. I’m personally very happy that there is now a fully-supported option that is going to save photographers with a similar workflow lots of time. And, this is just the first release; we can all count on new features and improvements in future updates. I’m happy to continue this conversation over email; if not, have a great weekend.

Nice video but this is all terribly confusing. The unzipped download file does not contain a folder name ending in lrplugin, which is what the Lightroom plug-in manager requires; and the only instructions refer to the plug-in created by Paul Kamphuis.

I already had the PACT,..i downloaded this new one, Put it in my plugin folder, went to LR5, went to publishing, went to publish manager, plugin manager, chose add new, added PS Plugin, it is there, go back to pub manager and it does not show,….can PACT and PS co-exist or do I have to choose?

Sorry, but this was a let-down. Downloaded the plugin, but nothing happened when I installed it. You should make a more informative post with specific installation instructions. Until then I think I will stick with the Pact-plugin as I find it more intuitive with my workflow.

We also just want to reiterate that this is the *first* release of the plug-in, and additional capabilities are planned down the road. The goal with this initial version is to have a fully supported plug-in that can be evolved over time by PhotoShelter developers using PhotoShelter’s latest API. In the meantime, depending on your workflow, it may still make sense to use the plug-in from Pact (as some folks have asked, you can have both downloaded simultaneously as well). Apologies for any confusion — we should have been more specific in the original blog post!

Publishing Services have been in Lightroom since version 3(released in 2011). Photoshelter really should offer a plug-in that includes publishing services for more seamless image management. I have downloaded (and paid for) the PACT plug-in. I hope Photoshelter has supported Paul Kamphuis and will enlist him to incorporate many of his features (Publish Services, updating of IPTC & images in PS galleries directly through LR).

I see this new plugin as a huge step backward.
You have added nothing of value compared to previous option, but have taken away all the advantages of a publishing module. You already had a perfectly good platform with the PACT to improve upon.. I think you dropped the ball.

Sorry but this is a bit underwhelming. I would have expected the options to update metadata only and to choose to overwrite existing files to be a basic requirement. It is also disappointing that this is not offered as a publish plugin, which is a much more sophisticated way of interfacing with online collections. I will stick to the Paul Kamphuis publish plugin, which is sometimes a bit buggy, but is more useful than this option. I had been hoping Photoshelter would give Paul some resources to develop his well thought out publish plugin. or develop something more advanced and stable. I’m not holding my breath, it has taken the team at Photoshelter years just to get to this very basic starting point.

I’ve had the plugin installed and supposedly working since Friday, except that I can’t connect to the PhotoShelter server. I keep getting an error message dialog box: “Unable to connect to PhotoShelter server. Please check your username and password.” Done all that. Also uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin, plus disabled every other plugin. No problems logging in using the website, WordPress plugin or Pact plugin. Also ruled out anti-virus and firewall software. It’s getting quite frustrating. Any suggestions? I’d really like to see the official plugin in action.

I was excited to see there is a new lightroom plugin. I have been using the PACT publish plugin for years and have been very happy with it. I love that it allows me to update images and/or metadata after they have been uploaded. This allows me to make images available quickly, but then perform further edits/teaks to selects and update later. It also allows me to update keywords and descriptions as I have time. Sometimes I find that I forgot an applicable keyword, and this allows me to easily update it from within lightroom. There are a few downsides to the PACT plugin though. I can’t set published/unpublished, who can view, or pricing profile details from within lightroom. This means I have to wait for it to finish publishing, then use the photoshelter web interface to make those settings. It also doesn’t sync comments, ratings, or allow lightboxes to be downloaded as collections. This new export plugin seems to take care of the published/unpublished and visibility shortcomings which is great. This makes it faster to send completed images to a client. Unfortunately I loose all the benefits of a publish plugin. I wish I could have all the features from both plugins (and more!), but for now I’ll stick with Paul’s publish plugin as that functionality is more important to me.

This plugin is great and would save me tons of time uploading images directly to my PS library. However the usual Lightroom option to export with a watermark seems to be missing from the bottom of the options when I choose PS as the export destination.

Hello everyone! I wanted to ask if users were happy with the metadata synching. I am having problems. For example it will only synch the data meta of one photo and not the whole set although in LR each picture has i a blanket metadata and a sentence or two more specifically about the subjects in the picture. Also I can’t tell if it’s synching from LR to PS or viceversa. I tried synching within LR and it reservers to the unedited version that is on LR. Is there anyone to choose in which direction it is synching. In this case LR is my tweaker version and I would like PS to reflect the changes I make in LR. Perhaps rexporting? But that wouldn’t make sense. Thank you!

To help out the people with Macs who are having trouble, like I did, figuring out just where this magic “preferred storage location” for the plug-in is, this is what I figured out, on my own, with absolutely no help from amy’s FAQ, a google search, or of course Adobe themselves (If there is actually an easier way, I would love to hear about it.):

1. In LR: click FILE/ PLUG-IN MANAGER… It should be noted first, that in this window you will see an option to “Add” a plugin. If you click it and find the plugin you downloaded and Add it, it will be added at the location where your Firefox or Chrome or whatever browser you use downloaded it to. The Plugin should be functional. But I don’t think that is a good place to keep plugins, so I did this manual process for storing the plugin within the LR app, where all other plugins seem to reside.
2. Next, click on any of the already-installed plug-ins on the left sidebar of the Plugin Manager window. Look at the file path that is listed under the Status window (click arrow if you see no details). Take note of the filepath, as that is where you want to put the PhotoShelter plugin.
3. Then, in Finder, find your downloaded plugin (assuming you have figured out how to download and unzip the plug in file)
4. Then, open a new finder window and navigate to the place where the plug-ins are.
This is where you may find a roadblock: My plugins are kept at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.app/ Contents/ PlugIns/ But the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.app is sort of locked, in that you can’t just drag and drop your plugin into it because it is not really a folder. Here is what you should do next:
5. Control-click on the Lightroom 4.app and select Show Package Contents. All the folders inside of the app will now be available for browsing. Navigate to the Plugins folder.
6. Drag your PhotoShelter plugin from the other Finder window over to the Plugins folder. But here is one more roadblock. You will get a message that you can’t modify the Plugins folder.
7. Click Authenticate. You will be prompted to enter your computer’s system password. Do so, then the plugin will move to the Plugin folder.
8. Quit and restart Lightroom. The plugin will be installed and recognized, but you still need to activate it:
9. Open Plugin Manager again, where you will see the PhotoShelter plugin in the sidebar. To the right, click “Enable.” That’s it.

I’d love to hear if this was helpful to anyone but me. Maybe I’m just a big dummy, like Redd Foxx says, but I guess I figured this out!